Who Chose the Books of the New Testament? E-Book

Charles E. Hill

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Questions for Restless Minds
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 78

Beschreibung

You can trust your Bible. Was the Bible born of a giant conspiracy? Many believe that the Bible was created as an instrument of domination by the Roman emperor Constantine and corrupt bishops seduced by political power. These men were not preserving orthodox Christianity. They were simply the winners—and thus the writers—of history. Is this Christianity's dirty secret? In Who Chose the Books of the New Testament?, Charles E. Hill examines the ancient evidence behind the formation of the New Testament. Hill retraces the origins of the canon and why certain books were privileged and others neglected. He concludes that the New Testament was inherited, not chosen. The early church preserved and proclaimed what they received. Learn how you got your Bible. The Questions for Restless Minds series applies God's word to today's issues. Each short book faces tough questions honestly and clearly, so you can think wisely, act with conviction, and become more like Christ.

Leseprobe

Questions for Restless Minds

Who Chose the Books of the New Testament?

Charles E. Hill

D. A. Carson,

Series Editor

Who Chose the Books of the New Testament?

Questions for Restless Minds, edited by D. A. Carson

Copyright 2022 Christ on Campus Initiative

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

Unless otherwise indicated, all Bible references are taken from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV®). Permanent Text Edition® (2016). Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Print ISBN 9781683595199

Digital ISBN 9781683595205

Library of Congress Control Number 2021937709

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Abigail Stocker, Jessi Strong, Mandi Newell

Cover Design: Brittany Schrock

Contents

Series Preface

1.Politics

2.Praxis

3.Proof

4.Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Study Guide Questions

For Further Reading

Series Preface

D. A. CARSON, SERIES EDITOR

The origin of this series of books lies with a group of faculty from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), under the leadership of Scott Manetsch. We wanted to address topics faced by today’s undergraduates, especially those from Christian homes and churches.

If you are one such student, you already know what we have in mind. You know that most churches, however encouraging they may be, are not equipped to prepare you for what you will face when you enroll at university.

It’s not as if you’ve never known any winsome atheists before going to college; it’s not as if you’ve never thought about Islam, or the credibility of the New Testament documents, or the nature of friendship, or gender identity, or how the claims of Jesus sound too exclusive and rather narrow, or the nature of evil. But up until now you’ve probably thought about such things within the shielding cocoon of a community of faith.

Now you are at college, and the communities in which you are embedded often find Christian perspectives to be at best oddly quaint and old-fashioned, if not repulsive. To use the current jargon, it’s easy to become socialized into a new community, a new world.

How shall you respond? You could, of course, withdraw a little: just buckle down and study computer science or Roman history (or whatever your subject is) and refuse to engage with others. Or you could throw over your Christian heritage as something that belongs to your immature years and buy into the cultural package that surrounds you. Or—and this is what we hope you will do—you could become better informed.

But how shall you go about this? On any disputed topic, you do not have the time, and probably not the interest, to bury yourself in a couple of dozen volumes written by experts for experts. And if you did, that would be on one topic—and there are scores of topics that will grab the attention of the inquisitive student. On the other hand, brief pamphlets with predictable answers couched in safe slogans will prove to be neither attractive nor convincing.

So we have adopted a middle course. We have written short books pitched at undergraduates who want arguments that are accessible and stimulating, but invariably courteous. The material is comprehensive enough that it has become an important resource for pastors and other campus leaders who devote their energies to work with students. Each book ends with a brief annotated bibliography and study questions, intended for readers who want to probe a little further.

Lexham Press is making this series available as attractive print books and in digital formats (ebook and Logos resource). We hope and pray you will find them helpful and convincing.

1

POLITICS

In the ongoing interaction of Christianity with its surrounding culture, the issue of how we got the Bible has become one of the flashpoints of our day. The popular narrative that has sprung up and taken root has become so often repeated, so widely adopted, and its explanatory power has become so effective, that it could probably now qualify as one of our cultural myths: a grand story that serves to explain for a culture a set of phenomena important for its self-understanding. Such a grand story must be simple in its broad strokes, but have enough historical correspondence to make itself plausible to great numbers of people.

Why is such a story about how we got the Bible needed as part of our cultural mythology? That Christianity and its Bible have played a highly prominent role in the history of Western culture is obvious and unavoidable to anyone who studies history. In times when the influence of Christianity is not so seriously questioned, the need for an explanatory myth is perhaps not felt so strongly. But today many would see the cultural landscape quite differently, regarding the remaining effects of Christianity as the final flickerings of a failed human experiment, already in its twilight hours.1 Our culture apparently needs a myth, then, not to account for its distinctively Christian character, but to explain its one-time fascination with an increasingly discredited religion. It needs to explain how it was that Christianity—not Islam, Judaism, or Hinduism, not secular Humanism or Atheism, but Christianity—came to play the elemental role it has in Western, and particularly in American, culture.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE CULTURAL MYTH

The simple and popular form of the myth is perhaps stated no better than the way Dan Brown gives it in a conversation in The Da Vinci Code.

“Who chose which gospels to include?” Sophie asked “Aha!” Teabing burst in with enthusiasm. “The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”2

So, Constantine chose the New Testament books.

I’ve become fond of telling how a professor in one of my son’s classes at the University of Florida asked his students, almost in passing, if anyone knew who it was that chose the books of the Bible? One student’s answer fully satisfied his instructor: “The people with the biggest army.” So, the people with the biggest army chose the New Testament books—and indeed, Constantine would have had the biggest army at the time, since (as we know from Star Warshistorians) Supreme Chancellor Palpatine’s Imperial stormtroopers had left the scene long, long ago.

People on airplanes, people at Starbucks, tell me the same story or some version of it. It was Constantine who was the key “chooser,” and he and the bishops he assembled for the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 (backed, of course, by the biggest army) assembled the Bible as we know it today. Others who have dug a bit deeper, perhaps read a book or taken a college course, may put a finer point on it and say that it was really Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who in the year 367 was the first to specify all twenty-seven books of the New Testament.3 What everyone seems to agree on is that it was a state-sponsored, state-aligned Christianity in the fourth century, fully three centuries after Christ, which chose the New Testament books. The Bible was put together after Christianity had become wedded to the state, and people, societies, and civilizations have been struggling to extract themselves from the perceived entanglements with Christianity and its politically constructed Bible ever since.

Christians who regard the Bible as in any real and transcendent sense the word of God might want to comfort themselves with the thought that this is a myth of Christian origins that has spread only on the popular level, through novels and films, and, yes, the occasional college classroom. Serious scholars and other informed people know it isn’t true. The funny thing is that many scholars are sounding a lot like the popularizers. In fact, some of the scholars, like Elaine Pagels of Princeton, Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and others, are the popularizers. “The Christian canonization process,” writes scholar David Dungan in his popular book Constantine’s Bible, “involved a governmental intrusion into what had been a scripture selection process.”4 Dungan regards the Christian creation of a canon of Scripture as “a unique development in the world’s religions, found for the first time in fourth-and fifth-century Romanized Catholic Christianity.”5

There is of course a long history between the time of Jesus and the critical events of the fourth century, the rise of Constantine, the eventual establishment of Christianity as the state religion, and homogenizing councils like the Council of Nicaea and others. In the minds of many scholars today, the one word that characterizes the entire intervening era perhaps better than any other is the word “diversity” (which, by a curious coincidence, also happens to be one of the most prized cultural values of our own day). Christianity from Jesus to Constantine, you might say, could be described as a very loose and largely uncoordinated movement of diverse groups with varying theologies, all vying for converts in the Greco-Roman world. Some groups were better organized than others, but no group had a majority; no group—from an objective and purely historical viewpoint—should be said to have had a better claim than any other to being the true representative